It’s Bumble… but it’s not romance we offer here
Group concept project looking at adding a fitness feature for Bumble.
The Brief
To explore the possibility of adding an additional feature to Bumble's offering. Bumble currently have three products; Date, Bizz and BFF. As a group, we were tasked with adding an additional feature named 'BumbleFit' that allowed people to find exercise partners.
Discover
To understand the problem, we had to understand the users
We created a survey (50 respondents) to get quantitative data on people's fitness habits. From the survey, we identified 12 respondents who were willing to do a follow up interview.
Main Insights:
Exercise is about keeping healthy, both mentally and physically
Strava is good for logging and recording activity but it can quickly get very competitive
Group activities are popular as exercise is about community and being motivated
Apps such as YouTube & Instagram are used for exercise inspiration
Competitor Research
We established that Bumblefit will move away from competing with other Fitness apps i.e. Garmin, Strava etc. and will instead be a Fitness Networking app aimed at amateurs who like to stay in shape.
Define
We distilled our research findings into digestable insights
We did this by creating a persona, Katie;
We also created an experience map where we mapped out Katie's typical journey when exercising. She is unmotivated by the monotony of pre-recorded YouTube videos, she would like to exercise with friends but they live too far away and often aren't available when she is.
“Katie needs a way to match with the right person of her desired skill level and interests so that she can be motivated and incentivised to stick to her new, healthy routine”
Develop & Test
Ideate, create, test, repeat
From the problem statement, we had two 'How Might We's' to take into the design studio to start the ideation process. How Might We...
"... motivate users to connect with people they haven't met before"
"... incorporate group exercise into the Bumble dating model"
User Testing
Three rounds of testing over different levels of fidelity; low, mid and high. Main issues:
Issues with terminology in the sign-up i.e. experience level, unclear on what sport this was meant for.
The 'happy path' user flow was a key problem that we had to change. Users were confused when landing on the discovery page from the set-up. Users also felt the chat feature and suggestions was clunky.
Sign-Up Page: Users having trouble understanding ‘experience level’ as it could have meant multiple different things and apply to different sports. ‘Fun Prompts’ was also confusing — users didn’t understand the point in the non-fitness related questions.
Discovery Page: We initially intended to use the ‘Hive’ page as the landing page once users had completed the sign-up process. When testing the product it was clear that users were unsure on where to go once they had arrived on the page.
Chat Page: Users were pretty confident in understanding the chat page as they are very common in most apps. We wanted to design it as close to the Bumble chat page as possible to keep consistency. The problem we had was again around the flow of the screens from ‘matching’ with someone to then chatting with them.
Deliver
We made the changes from the user testing and built up to hi-fidelity. In order to keep consistency across the design we created a style guide so that we were all working with similar components and spacing.
Next Steps
As we only designed the 'happy path' for Katie, we would look to design an additional flow for Katie to find a group or an instructor via the Discovery page
Explore a second Persona - more competitive athlete looking to find similar-experienced athletes
Add a paywall (Go Premium/Gold). As Bumble is a free service we would look to add a paywall to introduce additional revenue streams. Alternatively we could look to see how events or gyms could pay for promotional posts within the discovery section.
Accessibility assessment (colour blindness, temporary and permanent disabilities, etc.)
Learnings
Group projects need a facilitator. This was my first experience working in a group design sprint. I felt we went out of the blocks so quickly and got ahead of ourselves. We hadn't officially organised a facilitator so we had little direction for the first couple of days. I felt that I naturally took on that role as I like project managing and working with other people's skillsets. I learned that I really liked the facilitation process as it allowed me to get involved and direct the group.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective. Our design wasn't the most extravagant nor groundbreaking but it was easy to understand and test candidates said they really needed something similar which was